Ex-Financial Times Journalist Tom Foremski @ the Collision of Technology and Media

30

March

2008

|

02:26 AM

America/Los_Angeles

Ten Basic New Media Skills Journalists Need To Know

Software engineers have to update their bag of skills constantly. They learn new programming languages, new web standards, new development systems, and new lexicons constantly.

Most traditional journalists can barely type, they certainly can't spell. And they are unusually useless in terms of PC and other tech skills. But they know how to create compelling media and are able to do it consistently.

With all the new changes brought about by the Internet becoming the publishing platform for all media, journalists now need a few new skills. They don't need to know them well, as in typing and spelling, but they do need to know a bit about them, so that they can flourish as the media sector transforms itself.

Ten basic new media skills that today's journalist should know:

1) How to upload an image to a blog. (I know journalists that don't know how.)

2) How to add a link to text in an online story.

3) How to take and edit a photo and resize it for a web page.

4) How to embed the code for a video in a web page and resize it.

5) How to find relevant links to a story and add them to it.

6) How to take a digital video, edit it, and publish it in several formats.

7) How to make online stories discoverable.

8) How to read HTML and be able to fix common problems.

9) How to read CSS and be able to make modifications in stylesheets.

10) How to survive in an always-on work day, and produce two or three times as much content as before.